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Numerous royally commissioned texts were composed between 744 BC and
669 BC, a period during which Assyria became the dominant power in
southwestern Asia. Six hundred to six hundred and fifty such
inscriptions are known today. The Royal Inscriptions of the
Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, under the direction of Professor
Grant Frame of the University of Pennsylvania, will publish in print
and online all of the known royal inscriptions that were composed
during the reigns of the Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser III (744-727
BC), Shalmaneser V (726-722 BC), Sargon II (721-705 BC), Sennacherib
(704-681 BC), and Esarhaddon (680-669 BC), rulers whose deeds were
also recorded in the Bible and in some classical sources. The
individual texts range from short one-line labels to lengthy, detailed
inscriptions with over 500 lines (2500 words) of text.

These Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions (744-669 BC) represent only a
small, but important part of the vast Neo-Assyrian text corpus. They
are written in the Standard Babylonian dialect of Akkadian and provide
valuable insight into royal exploits, both on the battlefield and at
home, royal ideology, and Assyrian religion. Most of our understanding
of the political history of Assyria, and to some extent of Babylonia,
comes from these sources. Because this large corpus of texts has not
previously been published in one place, the RINAP Project will provide
up-to-date editions (with English translations) of Assyrian royal
inscriptions from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC) to the
reign of Esarhaddon (680-669 BC) in five print volumes and online, in
a fully lemmatized and indexed format. The aim of the project is to
make this vast text corpus easily accessible to scholars, students,
and the general public. RINAP Online will allow those interested in
Assyrian culture, history, language, religion, and texts to
efficiently search Akkadian and Sumerian words appearing in the
inscriptions and English words used in the translations. Project data
will be fully integrated into the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
(CDLI) and the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc).

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the RINAP Project
research grants in 2008, 2010, and 2012 to help carry out its work. The
publications of the RINAP Project are modeled on those of the
now-defunct Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project and carry
on where its Assyrian Periods sub-series (RIMA) ended.